Lights! Sound! Fury!

From the earliest days of moving pictures, directors have been obsessed with bringing William Shakespeare's Macbeth to the screen. Orson Welles played the tragic king among Stonehenge-like ruins. Akira Kurosawa's murderous medieval lord went down in the most furious fusillade of arrows ever filmed. Roman Polanski, funded by Playboy Productions, filmed Lady Macbeth sleepwalking in the nude.

Now it's Bollywood's turn. In director Vishal Bhardwaj's Maqbool, Macbeth has been turned into a Bombay Mob hit man tempted to kill his sadistic don for the don's disloyal mistress—the incarnation of Lady Macbeth. It may be possible to imagine three...